


keep on keeping on

by Llwy



Category: Borderlands (Video Games), The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, M/M, Medical Procedures, No Borderlands knowledge needed, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, additional characters to be tagged as they appear
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-29
Updated: 2020-04-29
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:55:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,363
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23901175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Llwy/pseuds/Llwy
Summary: How Martin Blackwood got a job, made some friends and saved the moon.(Alternatively: How the body double fell in love with a reprogrammed archiving robot)
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan Sims
Comments: 6
Kudos: 34





	keep on keeping on

Martin Blackwood was well-acquainted with poverty. It had been a chain around his ankle for his entire life, and the yawning pit of his mother’s medical expenses gave him little hope of ever escaping. He had started working at twelve years old, taking on any odd jobs that would hire him. There was no pity or charity to be found in the inhospitable deserts of Pandora, but there were a lot of unappealing tasks to be done by those too desperate to turn down work. It was never enough, though, when medicine costs continued to rise and his mother’s condition continued to worsen. 

When he was eighteen he took his pathetically meagre savings to a weapon vending machine, and bought himself the cheapest assault rifle they offered. It was a terrible bandit-made weapon, held together with duct tape and wishful thinking, but it gave him a gateway into a world of slightly more profitable jobs in vermin elimination. 

His first job was for Beatrice, the explosives maker who lived out past the town limits. She was constantly posting notices on the town bounty board asking people to get rid of the rakk that circled above her house, but nobody wanted to waste an afternoon shooting the sky for frankly dismal pay. Nobody except for Martin, that was. 

He trekked out there, new gun in hand, muttering his greeting over and over to himself. He needed to project just the right amount of bored confidence to make it seem like this was a routine job. He’d practised his shooting all day yesterday, and assault rifles didn’t need too much precision anyway, a few rakk shouldn’t cause him too much trouble. They were just birds. Birds with razor sharp talons and hooked teeth that could easily rend chunks of flesh from bone. Just birds. He was going to be fine. He did quite fervently wish he had been able to afford a shield, though. He had seen two vault hunters come through town a few months back, and when the local bandits had shot at them the shield had just absorbed everything before they’d completely laid waste to the entire camp singlehandedly. It had been the single coolest thing Martin had ever seen in his life, honestly. All of the ECHO dramas about vault hunters had paled in comparison to the real thing. He just had to channel the spirit of a vault hunter. This would be child’s play.

Arriving at Beatrice’s hut, he squared his shoulders, straightened his back, and tried to project confidence as he knocked the door. He heard grumbling from inside, a few small pops, and the door swung open to reveal a woman in jean shorts and a crop top. She gave him a once-over, and frowned at what she saw. 

“Yeah?” She said, one hand on her hip, radiating bored disapproval.

“I saw you posted about a rakk problem?” Despite all of his practice, it still came out as an uncertain question. She snorted in reply, and gave him a ‘follow me’ gesture as she began to walk around the house to the back. 

“Yeah, the bastards been nestin’ in the cliffs over here. Keep swoopin’ me whenever I go get supplies from my dynamite cache. If you think you can handle it, the job’s yours. Fair warnin’, if you can’t handle it, I’m gonna film your brutal death and post it on the ECHOnet, ‘k?.” 

He laughed, a little hysterically, as she stopped walking and pointed to a cliffside where he could see at least twenty rakk clinging.

“No, no way that will happen. Done this hundreds of times before. Easy. Simple.” 

He walked down, and all twenty rakk immediately launched themselves into the air from their perches. They began to circle above his head, and he had only a few seconds to bring his weapon up before one was already screeching and dive bombing him. He fired off a few rounds, but it moved faster than he had expected and they all missed. He heard Beatrice cheering back from the safety of the house, and swore quietly to himself. 

Aiming into the sky, he managed to shoot down three of the creatures using the tried and tested rakk hunting method of ‘spray and pray’, but he had only brought so much ammo with him, and couldn’t afford to waste this much. He dodged as another swooped at him from his left side, and felt its tail talons graze his back. He needed to get to cover, he was a sitting duck out here and he really, really didn’t want to become just another entry on the popular ECHOnet show Pandora’s Dumbest Deaths. Looking around desperately, he spotted a slight indent in the cliff face. It was too shallow to really be called a cave, but it would offer him protection, and force the rakk to attack him from only one direction. 

He sprinted as fast as he could for the cover of the cliff, ducking down as he heard the screech of a rakk attack from behind him. He felt the wind of its wings beat across his back, but somehow, thankfully, it missed him, and he stumbled into the cave, hugging his rifle close to his chest. 

After cutting off most of the rakks’ routes of attack, it became almost easy to pick them off one by one as they tried to swoop down on him. He crouched at the back of the indent, and would wait until they were almost upon him before shooting, so they would try to fly upwards and instead meet a stone roof. He was grinning widely as he emerged, victorious, and Beatrice gave a low whistle as he approached her. 

“I thought you were a goner for sure, but you didn’t do too bad boy. Nice thinkin’ out there.” 

“Yeah, no- No problem. Easy, like I said.” He told her proudly, and she grinned at him in reply. 

“Anyway, here’s your pay. Plus a li’l somethin’ for impressin’ me.” She handed him his hundred dollars payment in crumpled, dirty bills, along with a free box of assault rifle ammunition. He thanked her profusely, much to her amusement, and went back to his mother proud as a peacock. He even spent a few precious dollars on a skag skewer from the town’s food cart to celebrate. However, when he got home, his mother took one look at his bloodied shirt, torn from where the rakk had hit him, and told him he was a stupid, foolhardy boy. She snarled that she knew he would end up going into banditry, just like his father. He tried to explain, showed her the invoice for rakk elimination on his ECHO-device, but she refused to see. He ended up eating her half of the skag skewer, as she stubbornly refused to eat something he’d bought with ‘blood money’. 

After that, he stopped talking to her about his jobs. He told her nothing about what he did, and she asked him nothing in return. He would come home with blood on his shirt from an unlucky encounter with a nest of varkids and try to ignore the way his mother recoiled at him. He was used to her contempt, but the fear was a new, unwanted pain. It was about this time that he began considering going corporate. 

Growing up on Pandora, surviving in the shadows of the weapon mega-corporations who had chewed up and spat out the planet, Martin had a healthy amount of contempt for corporate drones. However, he was self aware enough to know he could never make it big as a mercenary, and securing a corporate gig might be his only way to escape endlessly living from one paycheck to another, burning through everything on health hypos and medication. He'd been told many times by others, jeering and unfriendly, that he was too soft for banditry. He didn’t see that as a bad thing, he liked to think of himself as a good person, but, unfortunately, a solid ninety percent of employment opportunities on Pandora involved banditry in some form or another. It was an old joke that the Pandoran insurance against theft was a good shotgun.

He tried to get by doing vermin extermination, some courier jobs, and various odds and ends for townsfolk, but his situation was tenuous. He realised this, but it took breaking his hand on a job for him to actually do something about it. 

It was a stupid mistake, he should have been past such things by that point. But perhaps he’d become too complacent in his work, after doing it for five years. The edge of fear had worn off, taking with it some of his sharpness. It was just a routine job, clearing out a skag pack that had moved into the junkyard behind one of the Catch-A-Ride garages. They had made themselves a nice burrow amongst the junk, and it took Martin hours to flush them out. By the time he’d finished off the alpha skag, he was exhausted, and he didn’t check through the remaining area closely enough for any stragglers. He grabbed the hind legs of the alpha skag, and began dragging it back to his vehicle. Chef Han had offered him a decent price for any skag carcasses he could bring back in edible condition, and Martin was too busy concentrating on the thought of extra pay to notice the skag pup in time. 

The thing burst from the junk pile like a demon emerging from the pit and immediately clamped its horrible, three jawed mouth around his hand. In the ensuing panic, Martin managed to completely forget the existence of his gun, and instead instinctively tried to fling the creature off by waving his arm around like a lunatic. All this did was bury the thing’s barbs deeper into his flesh, and by the time Martin recovered enough presence of mind to shoot the thing off, the flesh of his hand was hanging off in ribbons, his fingers an unrecognisable mess. He had no health hypo with him, and not enough money to buy one from the vending machine. He needed to get home, he had health hypos there, he’d bought five yesterday. He hadn’t thought he’d needed to bring any with him, he’d thought it was just a routine job, stupid, so stupid. He wrapped his hand with his scarf, stifling sobs of pain, and drove himself home one handed. 

By the time he arrived home and jabbed a health hypo into the mangled flesh of his palm, it was too late for it to be healed completely. The local sawbones gave him a rough splint and some bandages, and told him he should probably avoid using any firearms for the next week or two, unless he wanted his bones to rebreak. This excluded him from the majority of his regular work, and truly hammered home the point that he couldn’t continue to lead this lifestyle forever. This was a stupid mistake, but it was the kind of mistake that could very easily happen again. The doctor told him that he’d been very lucky he hadn’t bled out on the way home, and Martin didn’t feel like he had too much good luck left in him. 

So he began sending off applications, tapping them out slowly, laboriously with his one good hand. In hungry desperation, he applied to anything and everything. Every resume he sent was different, because he knew full well that nobody would even look at the application of a Pandoran with no education, no applicable experience and no skills outside of 'kind of decent with guns'. 

To the Lukas corporation he was Martin Blackwood from Promethea, experienced in advertising and graphic design. His cover letter talked about how much he admired their advertising campaign, how they effectively targeted lone hunters with their tagline, ‘who needs friends when you have guns’. He told them about how he had spent the past few months working for a burger restaurant on Promethea, but, unfortunately, the owner had been arrested for tax fraud before the grand opening, so all of his work was sadly unused, and he was out of a job and a paycheck. 

To Ålesund he was Martin Blackwood, an enthusiastic young programmer from Eden-5. He’d just graduated from a prestigious university, and had a prestigious amount of debt to go along with that. He was inexperienced, but desperate and more than willing to prove himself. 

To Grifter’s Bone he was an experienced mercenary from Pandora. This was the application he held out the most hope for, as it was the closest to the truth. He just replaced ‘vermin extermination’ with ‘bandit extermination’. 

It took three months to get any kind of reply. His hand had healed by that point, but he hadn’t forgotten the lean, hungry month he’d endured, so his breath caught in his throat as he opened an ECHO-mail from Lukas.

 _Dear Mr Blackwood,_ the message began, _we received your application and regret to inform you that we cannot proceed any further with you in regards to that position. However, do not be disheartened. We at Lukas Corporation have a unique opportunity we believe you to be perfect for!_

Martin paused, going back to that line and reading it again. Unique opportunity. Perfect. It absolutely screamed suspicious. Everyone knew the stories of human experimentation, the ways that desperate people were so often tricked into horrific things at the hands of these unfeeling behemoths. As a child the older kids had taken great relish in spreading stories about how Hilltop would kidnap people right from their beds and turn them into horrific half-spiderant abominations. He was roughly ninety percent that this was untrue, but the fear had always stayed with him. 

_Do not worry, it is not human experimentation. You are much too important for that._

That hardly made him feel better. 

_We will be calling you in one cycle to conduct a short ECHO interview, to assess your suitability for this position. You may find attached the signing bonus and monthly salary you will receive upon your successful interview!_

_Lukas Corporation_

_Because who needs friends when you have guns_

With sweating palms Martin clicked on the attached document. It looked like an official corporate contract, except everything but the section on pay was blacked out. He took a deep breath, counted the zeroes, and then counted again to make sure he had read that correctly the first time. This was more money than he could ever have conceived of making. It was probably more than enough money to buy the entirety of the town he lived in. His hands shook as he glanced over to where his mother slept in her armchair. He would never again have to worry about her care. With this kind of money, he could send her offworld, make sure she was somewhere she could live comfortably, well cared for. He had nobody else to miss, nobody who would miss him, and at least this way he could be a good son. He could make sure she spent the rest of her years somewhere other than a pathetic wooden shack in the wastes of Pandora. It was suspicious, yes, extremely, but he would lose nothing from doing a simple ECHO interview. So he penned a quick reply saying that he would be extremely happy to receive their call, and was looking forward to hearing from them. 

Thankfully, ECHO calls had no video component, so he didn’t have to do too much to prepare. He spent most of the next cycle reading and rereading his application and cover letter. Familiarising himself with the information on there, until he felt like he could live the lie convincingly. This Martin Blackwood was soft, privileged, someone who had a higher opinion of himself than was probably deserved. He was passionate about advertising, and found the psychology behind a successful advertising campaign fascinating. 

When the ECHO call came, he felt almost prepared. He accepted the call with steady hands, and was greeted by a woman doing a decent approximation of a cheerful tone. 

“Hello, you would be Martin Blackwood?” 

“That’s me, yes.” His voice came out level, confident, while his heart beat a frantic drumbeat against his chest. 

“Great! My name is Naomi Herne, I am calling on behalf of the Lukas corporation. Are you free to do the interview now?”

“Yes, I-” She cut him off before he could continue. 

“Fantastic! I just have a few questions for you. Just a formality, really. We just need to check your compatibility with our company. We’re considering you for a very important position, Mr Blackwood. We need to check that you have the right temperament for it.”

“About that, I was hoping that you could tell me which position I am actually interviewing for?” He asked, deciding to cut to the chase directly. 

“I’m afraid I’ll have to ask that you leave all questions for the end of the interview. Just to streamline the whole process, you understand. Now, we’ll begin with something easy. Can you let me know about your prior experience?” He was somewhat annoyed but almost entirely unsurprised that she had dodged his question. Luckily, though, her first question was quite easy. He’d practised this answer many times in front of the mirror, wanting to make sure he had his story perfect. 

“Well, I was mostly freelance, and until my last job the majority of my work was creating promotional materials for one-off events for smaller businesses. It was mostly graphic design, creating flyers and posters, that kind of thing. I eventually secured a contract heading up a project to promote a brand new burger restaurant. The owner had plans to open it into a franchise in the future, and was looking at me to create a cohesive brand. I worked on this for several months, from the beginning almost until completion.” He sighed loudly here, and slipped into a weary, frustrated tone for the next segment of his story. 

“Unfortunately, the owner got caught committing tax fraud, and I lost everything. After all the dust was settled, paying me for my work was the least concern. So that’s when I decided, ‘right, you need to think about the future’, so I decided to look for a job that offered more security.” She made the requisite sympathetic noises in the correct places, so he felt like his delivery had been pretty convincing. 

“So that’s why you decided to apply to our company, then?” She asked in response.

“Yeah, I’ve always thought that your advertising campaign was a stroke of genius.” Martin actually believed that their advertising campaign was absolutely awful. The success of the company was due entirely to the indisputable quality of the weapons and shields they produced, and nothing to do with their muted, boring posters or their cheesy slogan. However, Martin from Promethea had different ideas.

“There are plenty of hunters and mercenaries around the galaxy who see themselves as the ‘lone wolf’ type, and they are a pretty untapped market.” He continued. “Most of the other companies focus on selling to groups, but you saw a niche and went for it. I was particularly a fan of your advertising strategy for your Lonely Blade sniper rifle line.” The last bit was actually somewhat true. The advertisement had featured a figure cloaked in shadow crouched on top of a neon-lit building, silently tracking a target moving through the busy street below. It had made Martin briefly consider taking up sniping. 

“Ah, yes, that was a very popular product line. I can see you have done some research!” She paused for a few seconds here, and he could hear a brief burst of typing before she spoke again. 

“Ok, great, excellent, now let’s move on to the next portion of the interview. Tell me about yourself, Martin. What do you enjoy? What do you like to do for fun?”

“Well, I’m a big fan of poetry, particularly the Athenas Odes. I’d like to write myself, but I never seem to have the time.” The best lies were at least somewhat propped up by truth, and he didn’t have to fake the self deprecating laugh. He did write poetry sometimes, usually when he had some downtime on a job, but he never, ever planned on showing it to another living soul. He certainly wouldn’t admit to it in a job interview. 

“Who would you say is most important to you?” She asked, and Martin paused for a second, taken aback. He hadn’t expected this question, he hadn’t even considered being asked anything like this. 

“I… I suppose my mother. I’ve been her carer since I was a teenager, we- I- She is very important to me.” It was a weak answer, too hesitant by far, so he continued. “Family is very important, I think. Friendships, partnerships, they can drift away, but family is forever.” The Lukas corporation made a big deal being a family run business, that would probably be a good answer. 

“Fantastic, fantastic. Now, one final question. You discover that someone you trusted, a good friend, has been stealing from your mutual employer. They tell you to keep it secret, and offer to cut you in for a share of their profit. What do you do?”

Obviously, Martin would take the money. He wouldn’t even think twice about it. Everyone knew that corporations like Lukas had more money than God, and he would hardly lose sleep about siphoning off a little of that. He was also fully aware that this was entirely the wrong answer to give in a corporate interview. 

“Well, if we were good friends then I suppose I would give them the opportunity to turn themselves in.”

“And if they failed to do so?”

“Then I would be forced to report them.” 

“But they are a good friend, Mr Blackwood. Your best friend. What if they were your only friend? You know that being caught stealing that much money from a corporation is a possible death threat. Could you still report them?” She sounded pleased, almost eager, and he sighed deeply in response, as if conflicted about his answer.

“It would be hard, yeah, I wouldn’t take any pleasure from it. But in life we have to make sacrifices to do what is right.” He heard, from the background of the call, the faint rumble of another voice, and the sound of papers shuffling. When she next spoke, she still sounded pleased, so he supposed that he’d answered fairly well. 

“Ok, that’s it. It wasn’t too painful, was it?” She gave a small laugh here. “Now, do you have any questions for us?”

“Yeah, I- uh, I mentioned earlier, I was hoping you could tell me exactly what position I am interviewing for.”

There was silence for a few seconds, then some quiet murmuring. Martin tapped the end of his pen against the notepad he had on-hand to take interview notes. His notes so far consisted of a quick doodle of a rakk hive and the sentence ‘what IS the job???’ underlined three times. 

“It’s incredibly confidential, so I’m afraid that I can’t give you any details at this time. I can, however, let you know that it is... Somewhat of a personal assistant role. You would be working closely with a company executive, being their eyes, ears and hands, as it were. You would be their gatekeeper, deciding on what would be important enough to bring to their attention. Sorting through their day to day paperwork.”

That was strange. His cover letter and application said that he worked in advertising, and specialised in graphic design. There was no reason to personally select him for a job as a PA. He hadn’t listed any experience in such a role. Also, what did she mean by ‘somewhat’ of a personal assistant? He felt like he was possibly looking a gift horse in the mouth, but he needed to ask. He quickly jotted down the list of tasks she had mentioned. 

“I can’t help but wonder why you would specifically choose me? I mean, I don’t have any experience in that kind of position.”

“The executive in question can be very difficult.” He heard the same rumble of a man’s voice in the background after she said this, and guessed that the mysterious person overseeing this call must be the executive in question. 

“You were selected specifically because your application showed you to have a unique level of compatibility with them.” She finished. He thought that maybe he was beginning to get the picture now. Compatibility. It still sounded suspicious, definitely, but less on the medical experimentation side and more on the general corporate sleaziness side. There were undoubtedly catches, nasty little things she was carefully omitting, but it also didn’t completely sound like they were going to make him into a half human, half spiderant hybrid. If they were planning on that, they wouldn’t have bothered with an interview at all. 

“Now, did you have any more questions for us?” She asked, after he had been silent for a few seconds. 

“Oh, no, thank you. That was… Informative.”

“Well, I’m happy to say that your answers were just what we were looking for, Mr Blackwood. We would be delighted to formally offer you the position.”

“Oh, that’s great! Fantastic!”

“Yes, it is, isn’t it? We will send you an ECHO-mail containing the fast travel code in exactly three cycles. The code will be valid for a very limited time, so be prepared in advance. We look forward to seeing you, Mr. Blackwood.”

“Ye-” He began to reply, but was cut off by the distinct click of the call ending. Hardly polite, but he supposed that business people rarely were. Rude or not, however, he had done it. He had a job. He navigated back to the previous ECHO-mail, looked back at the attachment showing the money he would earn. His loud, relieved laughter caused his mother to bang on the wall, but he was riding too high to care. He ran out to Chef Han and bought two of his famous skag burgers to celebrate, and over their meal he told his mother the good news. She looked as happy as he had ever seen her, which only solidified the fact he was doing the right thing. 

He spent most of the next cycle persuading his neighbours to look after his mother. It took the rest of the month’s budget, his own stash of savings, several boxes of shotgun ammo and clearing out the varkid nest behind their house, but eventually they agreed to take her in until he had funds to transfer back. They told him in no uncertain terms that she would be thrown out into the dunes to fend for herself if payment didn’t come, and Martin’s smile didn’t chip at all as he assured them that he could guarantee the money would be sent within the month, with a generous extra if they escorted her to the nearest spaceport. They weren’t terrible people, just dirt poor and desperate. He was pretty certain that if this opportunity turned out to be a scam and he was forced to return, they would give his mother back to him with little fuss. If not, he knew their schedules, and knew exactly what time would be best to break into their house. 

After that, it was a matter of cleaning himself up. Someone working on Promethea probably wouldn’t have a beard or long hair, so those were the first to go. Peering at himself in the mirror, he frowned. He was probably a bit too obviously sunkissed for someone claiming to do most of his work from an office, his hands too calloused and scarred for someone working a comfortable advertising job. Wearing gloves, however, would be proving that he had something to hide. He was hoping that whoever met him didn’t care enough to look too closely. 

Packing didn’t take long. After boxing up his mother’s possessions and selling off his assault rifle, most of his stuff fit fairly easily into a backpack. He packed it, then repacked it, fussing over his clothing and wondering if it was presentable enough to pass muster. Probably not, but office wear was difficult to come by on Pandora, and he’d done his best with what he had. He went to say goodbye to his mother again, fussing over her until she called him a stupid boy and told him to leave her. He drank cup after cup of tea, too nauseous to stomach solid food. His foot drummed a constant beat on the floor, and the ghost of a smile drifted across his face as he imagined his mother telling him to cease that infernal tapping. He slept maybe eight hours total, his mind whirring too fast for rest.

Finally, after about two and a half achingly slow cycles had passed and the sun had finally set on Pandora’s ninety hour day, Martin left for the nearest fast travel station. He very deliberately did not turn back to look at his old house as he left, wanting to avoid tears if possible. He couldn’t say he had many fond memories of the place, but it had been his home for twenty three years. It was harder to leave than he had expected. If this job turned out well, and he wasn’t forced to come back with his tail between his legs, he wondered how long it would be before some new squatters moved in to make the place their own.

It was a good two hours walk to the fast travel station, and he used the time to try and clear his mind. He tried thinking about the latest ECHOnet drama he had been watching and how he thought the plot would continue, about the book he was halfway through, he even tried humming a quiet song to himself. However, his mind kept returning to prod at the vague, suspicious nature of the job description like a sore tooth, a nasty little voice in the back of his head telling him of all the terrible things they could mean by ‘compatibility’. He’d committed now, though. By doing this he could finally be the good son, provide the kind of life his mother should have. It was that thought that ultimately comforted him on the long trek through the sands. 

The fast travel station was a large metal structure, jutting out of the sand. Its yellow paint was chipped and sunbleached, and the holographic globe at the top glitched out every few seconds. Despite these cosmetic problems, however, it displayed the usual robust Magnus engineering and had stood the test of time in the Pandoran desert well, still working perfectly after five years. Next to the fast travel station was an open faced wooden shack containing ammunition and health hypo vending machines. As he reached the fast travel machine, he took a data drive from his pocket and plugged it into the waiting port. He downloaded all of the machine’s saved fast travel codes to it. By having the codes on a data drive, he would only have to plug it in and select his destination from a list. It was considerably faster than typing in the codes by hand, and would ensure he could make a quick escape if his destination turned out to be somewhere dangerous. After the download was finished, he carefully tucked the data drive into the secret compartment he had carved into the sole of his shoe. He had a few hours before he was due to receive the fast travel codes that would take him to his new job, so he sat himself down in the gap between the two vending machines, ensuring he was as hidden as possible from anyone passing by on the road. 

He had inadvertently fallen into a light doze when he was awoken by his ECHO-device’s message notification sound. He opened it up to find a long, long string of letters and numbers, along with a short note telling him the code was valid for only 10 minutes, so he’d better hurry up. He scrambled up to the fast travel system, heart in his throat, and punched in the code as quickly as possible. 

It had been years since he had last used fast travel, there was generally no need to travel that far for the average Pandoran. He had never forgotten the sensation of it, though. The split second feeling of being pulled apart by a million nanoscopic hooks and thrown back together again. Someone had told him once that you technically died every time you used fast travel, and that the person who emerged on the other side was actually a clone digistructed by the machine. He had been quite an imaginative child, and after hearing that he had lain awake many nights imagining the souls of travellers trapped inside the fast travel machine. As an adult, he didn’t _quite_ believe that the machines would trap his soul anymore, but he couldn’t imagine he would ever enjoy using them. 

When the purple digistruct light cleared from his eyes, Martin found himself in what looked like a large hospital room. Everything apart from the fast travel point was blindingly white and silver and spotlessly clean. It was cold, windowless and sterile, with only a single thick, metal plated door. His eyes caught on a tray of scalpels, a bonesaw hanging from a hook on the wall, a fridge labelled ‘BLOOD, BONES, ETC.’ in neat block capitals. Most terrifyingly, however, was what was resting on a stainless steel table, next to a jar of tongue compressors. A chart, with his picture affixed to the top. 

_NAME: Martin Blackwood_

_AGE: 23_

_HOME PLANET: Pandora_

The information went on. His blood type, his hair colour, eye colour, height, weight, shoe size. All completely correct. He knew for certain that his application to Lukas had listed his home planet as Promethea, and his age as 26, and he certainly hadn’t submitted any of the other information as part of his cover letter. He didn't know why they would need his shoe size, of all things, but he couldn't imagine that it was for any good reason. He needed to get out of here. Everyone knew bad things happened to people who were caught lying to corporations, and it was patently obvious that they had known he was lying the entire time. The interview was probably some sort of test to see if he was a corporate spy, to see how well he could stick to his own story. Internally cursing his own naive stupidity, he whirled back around to the fast travel station he had arrived at, slapped his hand across the screen and realised that its power had been cut off. His data drive was absolutely useless, his only escape plan completely cut off. He was stuck here. 

He immediately lunged for the door, twisting the handle to find that it was, of course, locked. There was no point trying to bash it down. Martin was a big man, but the door looked to have been built to withstand a grenade blast. There was no escape, no way out. He considered grabbing a scalpel, attacking whoever came through the door for him, but even as he considered it he already knew he couldn’t. Perhaps it was cowardice, or perhaps it was kindness, but he knew it was beyond him to attack an unarmed, unsuspecting, possibly innocent person like that. He did, however, slip a scalpel down his sleeve for later, just in case. 

So, instead, he sat on the examination table and tried to think of how to talk himself out of this. Tried to come up with a perfect, foolproof lie to make all of this go away. He had been drunk when he submitted the application, had gotten confused as to his own information? He’d been high from pain medication after breaking his wrist? He hadn’t submitted the application himself? Someone else had done it as a cruel prank on him? Possibly he could have argued that if they hadn’t personally tested him on his lies during the ECHO interview. Stupid, he was stupid to think he hadn’t been caught. 

They left him to sweat in oppressive silence for a while, long enough for Martin to have begun shivering slightly in the coldness of the room. He was just considering pulling a jumper out of his backpack when the door opened to reveal the largest man Martin had ever seen. 

Martin had always been tall and broad, the sort of man who was used to ducking down to get through doorways. People had often complimented him by telling him he had a frame built for intimidating people. He towered over most people, and more than once someone had reconsidered a fight with him after Martin had pulled himself up to his full height. This man, however, made Martin feel small. He was easily over seven and a half foot tall, and under the straining white fabric of his doctor’s coat Martin could see that his huge chest was oddly lumpy. His arms, when he reached over to pick up the chart, were too long, and his fingers had more joints than fingers, strictly speaking, should have. 

“Martin Blackwood, yeah?” 

His voice was like stones grinding together, like pebbles at the bottom of an iron bucket, it sounded completely inhuman. He tapped the chart with one finger, glanced between the photo there and the person sitting before him. 

“T-that would be me, yes.” He replied, and felt a brief spark of pride at how he managed to keep his voice almost steady. “Look, I know I lied about my employment history, but-” He was cut off here by a deeply unpleasant chuckle. 

“He don’t care ‘bout that rubbish. Don’t matter. You got chosen for your bones. Got good bones.” He opened a cupboard and took out a hypo filled with a deep, electric blue liquid.

“Bones? What do you mean I’ve got good bones?” Martin started to back away, scooting further back on the examination table. He used his (slightly) feigned panicking as cover to slip the scalpel into his hand, grasping it tightly in his right fist. He couldn’t say that the hypo was a huge surprise, as he _was_ in a hospital room, but it was still alarming. 

“They’re just the right size. Nice and strong from the looks of it, too.” He stepped closer, absolutely looming over the table where Martin sat. It was only as he saw him move that Martin realised that, somehow, his knees bent the opposite way. 

“I was told that this was a PA job. Why are you talking about my bones?!” He played up his hysteria, shouting the last part, trying to distract the man away from the weapon clutched in his right fist. 

“I’m just being paid to get you ready, you gotta talk to the boss about that.” Was his reply, and he reached out to grab Martin’s arm. 

That was when Martin struck. He plunged the scalpel into the man’s arm with all of his might, expecting to be able to use the shock and pain as his chance to escape through the now unlocked door. But instead, the scalpel met the man’s arm with an audible _tink,_ and skidded across the skin, parting it to reveal nothing but metal underneath. The man smiled at Martin, his teeth bright sharp, too-numerous and bright, shining silver. His arm lashed out, and Martin felt a sting in his neck, followed by an abrupt wave of weariness. He struggled against it, but as his vision blackened at the edges, he knew he’d lost this fight.

  
  


\----------------

  
  


He woke up by degrees. Slowly, arduously, fighting desperately against the bone-deep ache and tiredness that tried to pull him under. He tried to speak, and the sharp, biting pain that produced did a great deal to lift the veil of sleep from him. He tried to open his eyes, and was alarmed to find that he couldn’t. Everything felt simultaneously numb but tender, and he could feel something wrapped around his head. He assumed bandages, as he had vague memories of a hospital room and a monster with a hypo. A job, he had gone to start a new job, and they had locked him in and injected him with with something. He tried to move his arms, and his breathing quickened as he realised that he couldn’t. There was something around his wrists binding his arms to the bed. His ankles were similarly bound. He struggled, briefly, until a stabbing pain in his hands forced him to stop. 

“If you keep doing that you’re really going to mess up your new fingerprints.” A low, deep voice said directly into his ear. Martin instinctively jerked away with a pained hiss, not expecting someone to be leaning so close to him, and he heard the voice chuckle while moving back. 

“My apologies, but, in my defence, that was quite funny.” He could hear measured, heavy footsteps, the sound of glass clinking and liquid pouring. “I hope you’ll understand that I won’t offer you a drink right now.” They continued. 

“Wha-” That was all Martin could get out before an intense, stabbing pain in his throat forced him to stop speaking. He instinctively pulled at the restraints, wanting to feel his throat, and bit back a cry of pain. His hands hurt. His throat hurt. His skin felt too tight for him and his bones felt stretched. There was something wrong. There was something wrong with everything. His entire body felt wrong. He, whoever this man was, had he just said ‘new fingerprints’? Was that the reason for the searing pain he felt there? What about his throat? He could feel something there, every time he swallowed. A foreign lump, an ill-fitting mass nestled in his oesophagus. 

“That’ll be your new voice modulator. Don’t worry now, I’ve been assured that the pain is normal, and shows it’s working. You probably shouldn’t talk for a while, though.” 

“Voice?” This time he got a full word, but it was accompanied with a cough and the taste of copper on his tongue. New fingerprints and a voice modulator. He was beginning to piece together a picture now, and he didn’t enjoy the way the image was developing. He shifted his head around on the pillow, trying to dislodge the bandages from his head. He heard the tap of glass on metal, and a deep, heartfelt sigh. The sound of a drawer being opened, and items inside being moved around. 

“What did I _just_ say? Honestly.” The drawer was slammed closed, and the heavy footsteps moved closer. “We’ll talk about this later, when you are a little less prone to panic.” There were ice cold fingers on his neck, the prick of a needle, and then nothing again. 

\----------------

The next time he woke, the bandages were gone. His hands and legs were still restrained to the bed, but it no longer hurt to pull against them. His throat still ached, but it was more of a dull soreness now. Easy enough to ignore. His body had been covered in a white blanket, tucked tightly underneath him, and whatever had been done to him wasn’t visible yet. He tried to wriggle, to dislodge the sheet, but the person who had tucked it underneath him knew their craft well, and no matter what he did he couldn’t get it to move. 

He appeared to be in a private hospital room. It was considerably more comfortable than the room he had first arrived in, spotlessly clean but decorated with dark wooden panels as opposed to sterile steel. It was classy, and absolutely stank of money. There was a large, heavy wooden wardrobe leaning against the opposite wall, and a small table holding a lamp and a large stack of printed paper next to his hospital bed. To his left was a plain, heavy wooden door. To his right was a huge window, the dark blue curtains parted to look out on a gloomy, foggy teal sky. He could tell that he definitely wasn’t on Pandora anymore, but he couldn’t pinpoint his location any further than that. Underneath the window was an incredibly uncomfortable looking wooden chair. 

“Oh, excellent! You’re finally awake.” 

He hadn’t heard the door open, but when he turned around there was an unfamiliar man leaning over him. He startled, bit back a yelp of surprise, and the man’s smile grew wider at Martin’s reaction. His smile was unkind, set into the kind of face that could have been thirty or sixty. He was bearded, his coarse, thick hair completely snow white, but his features were sharp and mostly unlined by age. His eyes were an unnaturally pale blue with deep, dark circles under them, and he had the unhealthy, pallid skin tone of someone who never saw sun. Judging from the voice, he was the same man who had been there when Martin woke last. 

“What did you do to me?” Speaking was still mildly uncomfortable, but was no longer accompanied by any real pain. What was more uncomfortable was the fact Martin no longer recognised the voice leaving his mouth. 

“Nothing you didn’t agree to. _You_ are the one that chose to accept our job offer, Martin. Honestly, this animosity is completely unwarranted.” 

“What. Did. You. Do?”

He strode over to the window and opened it, letting in a cold, fish scented breeze. He took a few seconds to breathe deeply and look out over the view before turning back to Martin. His smile was kind, fatherly, but his eyes were ice, completely lacking in compassion. 

“It occurs to me that we haven’t been formally introduced yet.” He began. He grabbed the chair and pulled it closer to Martin’s bedside, but didn’t sit in it. Rather, he just leaned his arm on the backrest as he spoke. His tone was light, conversational. As if he was discussing the weather. “My name is Peter Lukas.”

Peter Lukas, the heir to the Lukas corporation. Martin had done research on the company while applying, and had discovered that the Lukas family had somewhat of a reputation. Their company was incredibly huge and inconceivably powerful, but the Lukas family were said to be incredibly reclusive. Very few people had even seen a member of the family in-person, and even fewer had spoken to them. Apparently, they were about as hands-off in the running of their company as was possible to be. Peter Lukas was, in name, the CEO. Martin had found enough anonymous ECHOnet posts complaining about Peter Lukas’s style of management, however, to ascertain that the man was incredibly difficult to pin down, and would avoid work like a cat avoided water. 

“Ah, good, you recognise my name. I’d be worried if you didn’t. I assume you know that I am the CEO of Lukas corporation, seeing as you _did_ apply to work for me. It is a position that comes with a number of…” He paused here for a few seconds, his fingers tapping against the dark wood of the chair as he glanced out of the window again. “Social obligations. Obligations I find myself at loath to fulfil. You see, Martin, I am a deeply solitary man. All of the meetings, parties, having to manage people, it’s just awful. I’d much rather be sailing the frozen seas out there.” 

At this, he swept his hand towards the window, presumably where the frozen sea lay. He then turned back to Martin, and swept his hand to gesture to his prone form. 

“That’s where you come in. Did you know that you share ninety five percent of my bone structure?” He looked at Martin expectantly, apparently waiting for a reply. Looking at Peter, Martin could see what he meant. Peter shared an identical build, and in a dark room he supposed their silhouettes would be very hard to tell apart. He could feel a yawning chasm open in the pit of his stomach as he began to suspect what Peter Lukas was going to tell him.

“What did you do to my face?” He spat out, unable to voice his suspicions directly, Hoping they were unfounded, that this was all a misunderstanding. However, Peter grinned widely, clapped his hands together once. 

“Excellent! I hoped that you were sharp, I’m glad my faith in you wasn’t entirely unfounded.” He ducked down, put his arm beneath the bedside table and came back with an expensive-looking silver hand mirror. 

“I decided that I needed someone to help me with my work. Take care of all the tedious day-to-day drudgery. I brought this up to my parents, but they thoroughly disapproved of the idea. Lukas has always been a family company. There is always a Lukas as CEO, giving away the position would show weakness in the family. I was stuck, at an impasse for what to do. Your application being forwarded to me for fraud was like a sign, a gift from the powers that be. Honestly, saying you were from Promethea? My company _owns_ Promethea. It’s like you _wanted_ to be caught.” 

He turned the mirror over and over in his hand, but his eyes were fixed unerringly on Martin’s face. Martin could feel cold sweat beading at his hairline. He opened his mouth to say something, possibly a denial, but Peter continued before he had the chance. 

“They said that Doctor Hopworth was the best, but I have to say I am blown away by the results. Despite his appearance, the man is just an artist with a scalpel.”

He turned the mirror over once more in his hands before finally, _finally,_ holding it up for Martin to see his own face. 

Pallid skin, coarse white hair, pale blue eyes open wide in horror. Peter Lukas’s face stared back at him from the mirror. 

“Congratulations, Martin.” Peter told him jovially. “You’re now my body double.”

**Author's Note:**

> This is the first thing I've written in over three years, so forgive me any errors. Major thanks to Abby, who endured me bitching about writing and gave me important feedback. If my other friends find this and read it then hey, I'm sure the fact I decided to go back into writing with this is absolutely no surprise.
> 
> I tried to write this to be understandable to people who have no familiarity with Borderlands, but please let me know if there is something confusing that I accidentally missed. It's hard for me to judge. 
> 
> Also, to people who are familiar with Borderlands, rakk are the actual worst and that entire scene was fuelled by my own vitriol.


End file.
